Really grateful to you for this excellent post!
I live in Italy, and here also real journalism became very rare.
Few authentic journalists were fired from traditional media (or went away by themselves) and started blogging on the internet, always facing the usual problems. One I can recommend among them is Gianni Lannes, which I think is one we should try to recruit here. The problem too is opening Steemit to other languages, because local, genuine news need to come in their local language too.